1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing system, an information processing apparatus, a printing method, a computer program and a computer-readable storage medium, for converting image data of characters, graphical images, and/or the like generated by application software into raster image data and transmitting the resultant raster image data to a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, continuous reductions in prices of color printers and scanners have been achieved. This has made it possible to easily copy a color document using a color printer and a scanner connected to a computer.
In general, when copying is performed using a scanner and a color printer connected to a computer, application software running on the computer reads image data from the scanner via a scanner driver and temporarily stores the image data in the form of a file on the computer. Thereafter, if a user specifies the file and issues a print command to print the specified file, the application software outputs the image data to the color printer via the printer driver.
In many cases, Microsoft Windows (R) is used as an OS (Operating System) of a computer. When Microsoft Windows is used as an OS, printing of data output from the application software is not started, until one page of data has been spooled and the one page of data has been output to the printer driver. In a case in which the printer has the capability of handling a page description language, the printer stores supplied print data in a memory disposed in the printer, and the printer starts printing when full one page of print data has been obtained in the memory. In this case, data described in the page description language may be supplied part by part in an arbitrary order. In contrast, in a printer that performs printing on the basis of raster data (bitmap data), printing is generally started before full one page of print data is obtained. Therefore, it is required that the computer should sequentially supply print data part by part in the same order as the order in which the data is printed starting at the top of paper along a printing direction. To meet this requirement, the printer driver has to output raster data in such a manner that one page of print data is spooled and the print data is rearranged so that the data is output in the same order as the order in which printing is performed on paper in the printing direction. In the conventional technique, as described above, the process of reading image data via the scanner driver and the process of outputting image data via the printer driver are performed separately (refer to, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-144940).
However, performing separately reading image data from the scanner and outputting image data to the printer results in an increase in the total time from accepting a copy start command issued by a user to the end of printing.